Category Archives: Argument

UPDATED (10/10): One Year Of Genocide. Hassan Nasrallah. Detonating Pagers & Mosques, Dismembering Babies, ‘Mowing The Lawn’ In West Bank. Palestine Essay, ‘De Sade At Sde Teiman’ & IDF Einsatzgruppen News

America, Argument, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Military, Morality, Palestinian Authority, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, South-Africa, War

UPDATED (10/10): Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip are documented through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year-long genocide.

Named and shamed. All the International Criminal Court need do is start criminal proceedings.
The Nazis hid their systematic crimes; Israelis–a majority–celebrate them, even use their depraved exploits on dating apps. Israeli society has a sadistic pornographic edge to it.

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2024/10/7/war-crimes-in-gaza-i-al-jazeera-investigations

One Year of Genocide. Courtesy of BBOBBY, Lowkey and DoubleDownNews. Take it from one who has a facility with words: this is powerful, brilliantly done. Not a word is misplaced. Not a rhythm in this calculated genocide is uncalculated.

UPDATE 10/1:  The Arab world mourns the death of Hassan Nasrallah, a man Norman Finkelstein called, in conversation with Glenn Greenwald a week prior to Nasrallah’s murder, “The frankest most impressive leader on the world stage.” (“Gaza is Gone.”)

Via SEYMOUR HERSH

The munitions dropped on a city block in the south of Beirut, by the mad dog medinah, to murder Hassan Nasrallah, are described thus by the New York Times, otherwise known as Israel’s stenographer:

A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.
The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.

MORE.

UPDATE 9/30: Luckily I have Hebrew. Two versions do America’s overlords who are in Israel transmit to the world. The Hebrew Maariv lede reads, “The Americans got the message: ground invasion of Lebanon is not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when.'”

UPDATE 9/28: As Mouin Rabbani reasons, the late Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizballah, did the principled thing: He stood foursquare with the Palestinians of Gaza against the mass murderers of Israel. The world stood by during the Jewish Holocaust, even though by 1942, the Final Solution was quite well-known among Allied powers.

Mad dog Medinah (=country in Hebrew) Israel dropped 85 tons of explosives on southern Beirut’s civilians to murder a major Arab political leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah? holds a majority seats in Lebanon’s Parliament. By the way, where do u think the Kirya, Israel’s major military compound, is located? In the heart of Tel Aviv
2:32 PM · Sep 28, 2024

Writes Ali Abunimah:

Confirmed by Hizballah on Saturday, Nasrallah’s killing comes after a series of tactical successes in the early stages of Israel’s unfolding full-scale attack on Lebanon, an open-ended assault that may well equal in barbarity Tel Aviv’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. These are terrible and difficult thoughts to absorb after almost a year of genocide. …
Nasrallah’s stature as a tactical and strategic thinker, as the most prominent and trusted leader of the Axis of Resistance, and as a personality capable of inspiring and reassuring supporters even in the worst of times, cannot be overstated.
The euphoria in Israel, Washington and some Arab capitals, will be exceeded only by the grief of Nasrallah’s supporters, who are far more numerous.
And there is no doubt that the loss is real and great from the perspective of a resistance that faces not only Israel’s formidable arsenal, but all the resources of the United States and the collective West.
Israel’s ability to carry out this series of attacks in quick succession will shake the confidence of many in Hizballah’s legendary prowess and operational security.
The attacks will go some way to restoring the prestige Tel Aviv has lost among its Western and Arab backers after a year of military failure in Gaza, and its failure to prevent the Hamas military offensive that wiped out the Gaza division of Israel’s army on 7 October 2023.
And although Hizballah has been hammering Israeli military assets and settlements in the north of historic Palestine with rockets, many in the region are asking why the resistance group’s response to Israel’s escalating aggression has not been harder and harsher – even as Israel intensifies its bombardment of civilians across Lebanon and within its capital.
Like others before him, Nasrallah gave his life on the road to liberate Palestine, and that struggle did not end today.

MORE.

UPDATE 9/19: The long arc of the Israeli terroristic enterprise has expanded into Beirut, Lebanon, in the form of a staggered operation against civilians, which saw the yellow-bellied Mossad operatives (allegedly) booby trap thousands of pagers and other devices deployed by Hezbollah non-combatants in civilian life (Hezbollah is an elected Lebanese political party).  The Israelis killed dozens and caused gruesome injuries to thousands, all to the whooping and cawing of their flaccid girly fanboys and groupies stateside. Need I say that all this is prohibited by the laws of armed conflict? (George Galloway’s “The Biggest Act of Mass terrorism” renders the best analysis of the biggest act of mass terrorism .)

A particularly disgusting aspect is the weaponization by Israel of electronic commodities. Let us hope that this malevolent tampering spurs local Lebanese industries. It will certainly lend the competition an edge.

Two things to bear in mind: First, Israeli mama’s boys opt for digital warfare because they lack the courage to fight combatants openly and up close like men would. Second, Israel is the proud promulgator of the “doctrine of inflicting massive harm to civilians.” Israel, the neighborhood bully, proudly named its killer creed “after an area of Beirut, Dahiya.” (MEI) All this occurred practically in the presence of US special envoy Amos Hochstein, which shows how Israel spits on its biggest benefactor, the US.

Few are the solid technical reports about what Israel did, except to fellate the morally flaccid terrorist state. “Lessons from the Lebanon pager bombing attack: Threats by Remote Execution and Activating Sleeper Devices in the Context of IoT and Connected Devices” by By Srikanth RP, at Express Computer, is thoughtful.

It touches on “Remote Execution and Weaponization of Devices” in a connected universe, “Supply Chain Infiltration and Trust Issues”, “Activation of Sleeper Devices and Latent Threats,” etc, concluding that “Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) must manage devices from procurement through decommissioning to ensure security throughout.

UPDATE: To paraphrase the great Scott Ritter on the Mint Press News podcast: “Israel is a genocidal NATION doing what it is incline to do.” What you see here, the IDF kicking an injured man off a West Bank rooftop, is “The Truth of Israel”:

https://x.com/hzomlot/status/1836842024990847080

Also what I demonstrated in a comprehensive essay, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?”

UPDATE 9/13: Detonating Mosques with jubilation. “Today we are blowing up a mosque. No more Friday prayers, yeah!” Watch:

https://x.com/QudsNen/status/1798428814152028233

A mosque, with love to vampiric wifey.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/02/15/exp-amanpour-idf-social-media-pkg-021501pseg2-cnni-world.cnn

Dismembering babies, minds and little bodies shattered for life:

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/1834313096971862361

UPDATE 9/11: Murdering Animals and Owners, as in “mowing the lawn”; it’s all in a day’s work for Israel’s finest. I give you The Chosen People’s Settlers. What a mindset it takes to slaughter a helpless creature:

Turmusaya, Ramallah District: Israeli settlers chase Palestinian shepherd, steal five sheep and kill two“:

UPDATE (9/5/2024): ‘Mowing the Lawn.’ The Devil and its handlers, IDF under Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, said on Wednesday that the military has been “mowing the lawn” during an ongoing major operation” in the West Bank, which will require the need to “pull out the roots.”

The West Bank has now been invaded by IDF. The orgiastic destruction of built and natural habitat has begun there in earnest. Ethnic cleansing has commenced there too. Since October 7, one child has been killed in the West Bank every 2nd day

The “operation” dubbed “Summer Camps” now openly uses terms Israel had once denied were in use.

Suffer the children.

UPDATE (9/2/024): Genocidal impetus is underway in the West Bank courtesy of Satan’s forces on earth. Via Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur to the occupied territories, comes the news that the IDF is in the midst of a full military assault, destroying hospitals, roads, infrastructure already damaged in prior raids, replete with telling the Palestinians to evacuate en mass. (Drop Site)

Via Bashir Matahen, the director of Public Relations and Media at the Jenin Municipality: “The occupying (Israeli) forces have demolished more than 70% of the city’s streets completely (…) to a depth of approximately one to one-and-half meters, which has led to the destruction of water and sewage networks, as well as communication and electricity cables, in the areas that were demolished, initially estimated to cover 20 kilometers.” (Middle East Monitor)

IDF Einsatzgruppen streams into East Jerusalem (WorldBeyondWar):

(8/30/024): If you support this scum, you are scum. IDF Einsatzgruppen

https://x.com/EyeonPalestine/status/1829583904757432392

https://x.com/EyeonPalestine/status/1829583904757432392

UPDATE (8/29/024): Israel: What Moral Rot Looks Like: As Israel’s IDF death squads, Einsatzgruppen, murder, maim, starve and destroy all human life in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank—where land and pitiful possessions are being stolen daily with impunity by armed settlers—the IDF’s auxiliaries, says Mouin Rabbani—Israelis party on. The picture of moral decadence:

According to UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), on average, “one Palestinian child [has been] killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, every two days since October 2023.”

Since the Demon State began its genocide in Gaza, young Bisan, a heroic reporter, chronicler of life under Genocide, has prefaced each of her many transmissions from Gaza like this: “This is Bisan in Gaza, and I am still alive.” In what universe is a young woman forced into such a reality for close on a year? Now Bisan’s skin is ulcerating. Due to the absence of sanitation infrastructure (bombed) and products (aid delivery halted by the Satan State) in Gaza; a human being’s largest organ and barrier to pestilence—the skin—is losing its capacity to protect internal organs. This is very dangerous, since all roads lead, via Israel, to sepsis and organ damage, even death.

Via B’Tselem” “Forcible transfer of isolated Palestinian communities and families in Area C under cover of Gaza fighting.”

Oren Ziv from +972, August 19, 2024, reports on the latest Settler Pogroms. IDF soldiers watch on as settlers rampage through West Bank villages, burning, looting and, yes, murdering. Arrests? Nah. For what? Nothing to see. Move on. Jewish supremacy; Jews über alles. “If you try to defend yourself, you’re dead’”.

https://x.com/btselem/status/1828003273489445196

Degeneracy v. Dignity. A settler—they are such lovelies—threatens a West Bank Palestinian man with rape a la Sde Teiman (and Christians-For-Fellating-Israel fire me for penning “De Sade At Sde Teiman: When Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal“) My indelicate language befits a way worse reality.

Watch this Twitter video, via the Human Rights organization, B’Tselem. “Rape in the name of God,” threatens a Settler named Shem Tov Luski . And Christians defend these people and alienate me. I’ve added “Christian Ethics” to my skill set on LinkedIn.

Degeneracy v. dignity
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6hgofoJAMo

https://x.com/btselem/status/1828003273489445196

In the latest essay, I had also mused about the Israeli sexual prurience:

“When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about mass rape by their enemies (read Ali Abunimah’s ‘Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film‘), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the Israel defense Forces (IDF), and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law.”

As do I mention the temperamental difference between the peoples, Israeli and Palestinian. You can see it in the video. The Palestinian man is embarrassed at the sexual brazenness. Not the Settler.

NEW ESSAY is “De Sade At Sde Teiman: When Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal.” It is currently featured on The Unz Review, The New American (NOT), LewRockwell.com and Power & Market at The Mises Institute.

Essay was cancelled here, author dismissed, for adhering to Christian, not AIPAC, ethics. We know what Jesus would have done. Actually, as one Christian told me, Christ did inveigh exactly against what he termed “The Synagogue of Satan.”

The New American fired me for this recent piece on Israel, https://ilanamercer.com/2024/08/de-sade-sde-teiman-genocide-snuff-films-extra-judicial-assassinations-rape-de-facto-legal/, and will accept from me NO essays, even on topics not Genocide related. It’s me, the only voice for Christian Ethics on their New American page, that they want GONE. AIPAC American is unapologetic. I, however, can sleep at night and will continue to do what’s right.

Read ‘De Sade SdeTeiman: When Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal,’ on IlanaMercer.com:

Like, Follow and Share on Social Media to defeat the AIPAC algorithm. Remember that Facebook has long since banned all IlanaMercer.com hyperlinks.

The essay is now on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.

As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity,” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of Palestinian hostages.

From Knesset members to the distinguishably dumb panelists who festoon that country’s tv networks, “Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian [hostages] shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide.”

The crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over—these Israel has already de facto legalized in what passes for law in that thugocracy.

By the Middle East Monitor’s telling, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”

Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by. ……

A deception embedded deep in this lattice of lies is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself. Indeed, a new report authored by the aforementioned +972 Magazine, “for the human rights group Yesh Din, shows how the main role of Israel’s military law-enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”

In this case, the greater goal of Israel’s legal apparatus and jurisprudence is to fend off charges of genocide and war-crimes in international courts of law. Be mindful, then, that any investigation ever launched or any arrests made by Israeli authorities are symbolic, cursory and inconsequential, part of a well-established strategy to safeguard the greater criminal enterprise. …

Essentially, expect the Jewish State’s stooges (Alan Dershowitz in the lead) to be trotted out to huff and puff indignantly at the very notion that a manifestly lawless thug of a state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of unfathomable thuggery and cruelty, is incapable of investigating itself. Antisemitism.

…Ultimately, Israel has become adept at narrative, at manufacturing mantras about its unsurpassed morality, this, as it is mired in illegality and criminality. (Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW,” in the essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”.) …

… THE REST, so far, is on The Unz Review, The New American (NOT), LewRockwell.com and Power & Market, The Mises Institute, August 23.

OR, now on IlanaMercer.com

*Images as screen posts via Gazan photojournalists Adel Al-Hawajri and Hosni Salah. Introduced by Talia Mullin of ScheerPost

UPDATE VII (7/25): Essay On Israel’s Performative Contradictions+NEWS: Ethnocide In The West Bank

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Crime, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Individual Rights, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Justice, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Terrorism, The West

THE NEW ESSAY appeared on LewRockwell.com and The Unz Review, where it was the main feature, as well as at my home on The New American.  And on Power & Market at the Mises Institute, July 4.

You can now read Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocideon IlanaMercer.com.

This new essay is Part II, and follows on, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024

The essay was variously titled:

Defending Gaza (II): “‘Synagogue of Satan’ Denies Genocide While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide

Defending Gaza (II): “Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide

Defending Gaza (II): “Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation”

Explained in Part II, first, using Hoppean Argumentation, is why Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide. These tactics amount to ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE.

Next, lest I be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide is reasonably qualified and clarified. In particular, with reference to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR! I explained why the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people is inoffensive to the natural-law libertarian.

The reason I then, and in most of my essays on Gaza, insist on CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE of Gaza is this: We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists. However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated.

Showing how Israel CO-OPTS HUMAN-RIGHTS LAWhow Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature is essential. Of course, no matter who has committed a crime in my neighborhood or in its vicinity; Washington State has no right to turn me out of my home, which is mine, which I own. The state certainly has no right to pulverize my home because its agents believe outlaws hide in the neighborhood.

On to ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK. Did you know that,A combined ‘effort’ between IDF- and security force soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is responsible for pogroms in which over 528 Palestinians have been murdered since October 7, among whom were 126 children“? We ought to know this.

Finally, PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION: The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening is used in the coda to to validate the Palestinians’ reality, as they have been telling it to a mostly unbelieving universe (myself included) over decades.

The Hoppean proposition deployed to trace the contours of Israel’s reality is this: Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions.

Using the same meta-principle, Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians—their reasons for resentment and resistance—as they’ve been telling it to the world.  Excerpt from the coda:

…Palestinians under Israel are perhaps the most imperiled people in the world. If the proponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were to deny this; they’d be living a lie. To expose the liar’s life of lies; the denier of the Palestinian reality ought to be compelled to live his own lie. How would our holocaust denier be forced into performing or living his lie?

Like this: The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would have to be parachuted into the midst of the living ghosts of Gaza. He would be filmed as he lives the life of a Palestinian, running hither and yon as the tanks advance on him, or ducking-and-diving during bombardments from above, as if one can escape the death radius of a 2000- or 500 pound, American-made bomb.

The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be recorded scratching for scraps, lugging jerricans of brackish, contaminated drinking water back to his nylon dwelling, clambering over kilometers of decaying structures, through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera’s viewfinder will find the denier queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been pulverized by the Israelis. He or she would be taped up-close in the throes of dysentery, sepsis, and starvation; intubated or cannulated or amputated or C-sectioned without narcotics, writhing on a hospital floor as slippery as an abattoir, listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s killer-cum-spy drones.

QED. Points proven.

…THE REST was on LewRockwell.com, The Unz Review & The New American. And Power & Market at the Mises Institute, July 4.

READ IT now on IlanaMercer.com.

The new essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide,” is Part II.  It follows on, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024

The links are legion throughout; the logic unassailable.

UPDATE VIII (7/26): Ethnocide In The West Bank. If the West Bank is increasingly looking like Gaza, it’s because it and its people are being evicted and murdered, too. The great Peter Oborne (Unscripted), on “How Israel devastated refugee camps in the West Bank since 7 October.

UPDATE VII (7/24): War Criminal In Congress. Patriot Scott Ritter, who has been fighting for his country for a lifetime: “I’d have tackled the SOB Bibi for launching a frontal assault on our people & on what makes America great: the Constitution, the 1st Amendment.” May the colluding quislings of Congress, bought and paid for by War Criminals, rot. WATCH.

UPDATE VI (July 23): LAVROV: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a UN Security Council Open Debate on the Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, New York, July 17, 2024:

… Israel is waging jointly with its American allies …. Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. This is twice as many as the number of civilian victims on both sides of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine over the past 10 years. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine over the past 10 years since the state coup in February 2014. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry that examines violations of international human rights law, Palestinians aged below 18 make up approximately half of Gaza’s population. It means that they were born and grew up in conditions of a total blockade. Apart from the current escalation of violence, they have seen other Israeli military operations, namely Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021.
Gaza is in ruins today. Residential buildings, schools and hospitals have been turned into rubble, and the critical civilian infrastructure facilities have been knocked out of service. There is an epidemic of infectious diseases and mass hunger there. It is a real humanitarian disaster. There is no safe and reliable access to the victims and those in need amid the ongoing hostilities.

UPDATE V (7/23). BUSTED: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized:

“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 is here.

Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the ‘ICESCR’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the ‘ICCPR’).”

Some analysis is at Al Jazeera. I found Lamis Deek’s interview with George Galloway most excellent and compelling. WATCH.

(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.

UPDATE I: Funny tidbit regarding my essay on The Unz Review. I can’t post it on Twatter, or X, for you. The phrase used in the title, that of Jesus not mine, is considered hate speech on X. The X algorithm doesn’t discriminate between the naughty words of the putative Son Of God and those of other mortals. Banned.

UPDATE II (7/6): Categorically true. A philosopher, via Mondoweiss: “… if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw. … If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.”

UPDATE III (7/8): IDF war criminals are trying to shed culpability. The English 972 article is milder, so I translate from the Hebrew version of the magazine, whose URL cannot be transposed here as it is in Hebrew: ‘We fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.’

UPDATE IV (7/10): The august British medical journal, The Lancet,
has awoken to its obligation to Truth:

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.

MORE.

ONLY-FOLLOWING-ORDERS DEFENSE. I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators, express sadness over the fact that IDF soldiers will invariably suffer from years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Not so fast. With every Tik Tok upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By the numbers. Here is the latest exemplar of the “most moral military in the world”:

No shortage of shameless IDF. The Nuremberg defense is invalid: “I was only following orders. I had been brainwashed.”

NEW BOOK REVIEWED ON RECKONIN’ By Dr. CLYDE WILSON

Argument, Business, Capitalism, COVID-19, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Nationhood, Outsourcing, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Pseudoscience, Republicans, Technology, The South

The Paleolibertarian Guide to Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & the Aberrant Economy” by Ilana Mercer: A RECKONIN REVIEW by ~ CLYDE WILSON, distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews. Dr. Wilson is also is co-publisher of Shotwell Publishing, a source for unreconstructed Southern books.

LIBERTARIANS rightly understand that economic freedom goes along with individual liberty and prosperity. But American libertarians have become, it seems, advocates of a solipsistic individual will and license. The sovereign individual is an imaginary beast that does not exist. Paleolibertarians like Ilana Mercer understand that man lives in a community, the virtues of which are necessary for capitalism and which is his best protection from intrusive government. And such virtues do not fit any and every society.

In this incisive chapter-and-verse exposé of the current American regime, she argues that the state, which now represents a merger of government and large corporations, is presiding over the destruction of American civil society. That is the nature of the touted global economy and global politics.

Mercer’s description of the American economic and social condition will not find disagreement from any Reckonin’ reader. “The business of life,” she writes, “one’s livelihood, and the locality in which one lives and loves – these are the property repositories for conservative loyalties.”

Living standards of the middle and working classes are falling. You would think this would bring the attention of public leaders. Instead, they are busy promoting ethnic chaos, genocide, and sodomy here and abroad. The Covid lockdown killed 3.3 million small businesses; the homeless now include more and more families; Deep Tech claims to need to import foreign talent (Republican boilerplate) while firing Americans. Differences in wealth distribution are higher than ever seen in history.

Our leaders don’t seem to see any problem with their ways. They don’t notice catastrophic debt and overextended, wasteful, and incompetent military as problems, despite their contribution to the “aberrant” economy.

Mercer’s treatment of health tyranny, immigration, and outsourcing is informative and hard-hitting. “The free flow of goods across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of people across borders…. The very stuff of life has been contracted out. Not mere jobs, but careers; not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the means of production.”

The author advocates and illustrates a preference for good old common sense. Common sense was long the undergirding of our Anglo-American law and way of life. Why have so many abandoned it, as in the Covid fraud, for the authority of phony “expertise”?

Mercer is always a fun read because of her creative labelling: castrati Republicans, Washington wokerati, FixNews, ConOink, Learjet liberals, bafflegab for bureaucratic and progressive discourse, ‘Walmart with Missiles’ for the present U.S.

NEW BOOK: UPDATE II (3/13): The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy

Argument, Business, Capitalism, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Ethics, Free Markets, Free Speech, Government, Healthcare, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Morality, Natural Law, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Republicans, Science, Technology, The State

State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“DEEP TECH,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“THE ABERRANT ECONOMY” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overtone window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

 

 

UPDATE (2/25/024): Who knows what this means? Still, a nice category in which to be No. 1, in New Releases however fleetingly: Ethics & Morality.

UPDATE II (3/13/024): I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”